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Nepal Maoists threaten to go it alone in new government

30.04.2008

KATHMANDU: Nepal's ex-rebel Maoists, surprise winners in landmark polls this month, will lead the new government with or without the help of the parties they defeated, their spokesman warned Wednesday.
"We will lead the government as we are the biggest party," spokesman Krishna Bahadur Mahara told AFP on the sidelines of a Maoist central committee meeting.
"If the other parties don't want to join us in a coalition, we will form the government by ourselves," Mahara said.
The ultra-leftists -- who waged a bloody guerrilla war for a decade -- took 220 seats in a 601-member body that will chart Nepal's political future -- twice the number of seats won by their nearest rival.
Nepal's constituent assembly is set to abolish the world's last Hindu monarchy in its first meeting, and then go on to write a new constitution for the impoverished Himalayan country sandwiched between China and India.
Established political parties fared dismally in the elections, despite predictions they would win. The Nepali Congress garnered just 110 seats and the Communist Party of Nepal (Unified Marxist-Leninist) 103.
Both the defeated parties are currently holding internal meetings amid deep divisions in their ranks about whether they should join the Maoists in government.
The April 10 elections were a central plank of a peace deal struck in 2006 between Nepal's Maoists and mainstream parties.
The peace pact ended the "people's war" launched in 1996 that left at least 13,000 people dead and destroyed an already fragile economy.

Source: http://www.timesofoman.com/innercat.asp?detail=16367

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